Articles Archive

It is another year and that must mean another appearance by my guest Holly Ordway. Holly and I discuss her most recent book, Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography from Word…

A Cain and Abel Story for Modern Man

“Thinking as a Human Being.” David Weinberger reviews James D. Madden’s Thinking about Thinking: Mind and Meaning in the Era of Techno-Nihilism, which probes underlying questions about the nature of…

A chief virtue of sheep is, indeed, that they are content with remarkably little, and—this is key—they are rooted and aware citizens of their locale.

Here, in this shed’s unremarkable pool of silence, I am reminded of other places where silence stretched like an ocean. I happened upon one of those waning shores the previous…

Rushing to enslave themselves like animals in a cage, the animal rights and climate activists who think they are on the “right side of history” are unwittingly reinforcing their dependence…

If I am therefore departing one field in which I hoped to do some good work in place, I hope to deepen my practice as an English professor who lives…

“Taking the High Road.” Nadya Williams issues a stirring call to root liberal education in a transcendent vision of what it means to be human: “what if the future of…

In a world in which there are so many problems to solve, solitude plays an important role in helping us remember that life consists of more than finding and righting…

Theodore Roosevelt never recovered from the loss of his son in WWI

Do we treat the created order as if it belongs to God or exclusively to ourselves? Is dominion the same as domination? Is stewardship the same as subjugation? Such notions…

Why is it that we can all say that this building works, that this room is just right, that this town is good and pleasing? Why is it that we…

“Against Human Flourishing.” Paul Griffiths gently suggests that the paradigm of “flourishing” may be inadequate to ascribe meaning to our lives and efforts: “Damage, flourishing’s apparent opposite, may have contributions…

If we imagine that the fate of our times hangs upon our efforts, we’ll deceive ourselves and miss out on the goods and pleasures that are at hand waiting to…

As Americans, we must remember that place matters, and our founding principles are best understood when we look at how they were made real in the city of brotherly love.

Surviving the holiday without our loved ones

The promise and peril of current forms of localism, with Trevor Latimer.

“Growing, Fermenting, Canning, and Why?” The Maurin Academy is hosting a slate of discussions on home food production to get you ready for the growing season: “It’s time to plan…

Yet our little sister does not play the victim. She presses on, a sufferer who labors as best she can while shadows and thorns press in against her. And she…

Our duty is to live lives that conform to what is good, true, and beautiful. Natural rights in general, and the rights enshrined in the Constitution in particular, are means…

It’s a new year, and many of us are thinking about self-improvement. This is a wonderful thing to do. We all need a bit of a tune-up now and then.…

Might our local faith communities support such cultivation of virtue, while also restoring what might again be a hub of parish social life?

“Red Dragonflies.” Steven Knepper offers a deeply informed consideration of Byung-Chul Han’s intellectual and spiritual trajectory. Knepper argues that Han’s emphasis on contemplation has much to offer: “The Church’s contemplative…

How are all these entries against despair? Insofar as metaphor is an act that creates meaning, it’s an act of hope: even intractable realities can be changed by placing them…